Why We Need the Liberal Arts
Blake Lively is a relatively famous actor who has appeared in a TV show about horrible rich high school students behaving badly and some movie about a pair of pants that sees the world through steerage and doing odd jobs for under the table pay at local resorts. She is married to another relatively famous person named Ryan Reynolds. Ryan Reynolds is famous for somehow constantly getting cast in movies despite having an acting range that starts at A and ends somewhere before B. They are both reasonably if conventionally attractive people.
Ms. Lively seems to understand that fame can be a fleeting thing and she would like to maximize her wealth and brand name potential while it lasts. To do this, she launched an e-commerce site called Preserve. Preserve sells 80 dollars candles that are hopefully made with essence of Unicorn tears. Preserve is also launching a line of clothing. The marketing campaign for her line of clothing was called “The Allure of Antebellum.”
Unsurprisingly the Internet had a field day with the name of the marketing campaign. The Snark flew as only it can on the Internet. Gawker’s headline was “Blake Lively’s Fall Fashion Inspiration is Slaveowners.” Unsurprisingly this hurt Ms. Lively’s feelings and Gawker received a threatening letter from her lawyers. Gawker being Gawker proudly published the angry lawyer letter. I’m surprised people don’t get this about Gawker by now.
I don’t blame Ms. Lively’s lawyer for sending the letter. Lawyers are controlled by their clients as they should. I can easily imagine Mr. Korologos explaining to Ms. Lively that Gawker is almost certainly defended by the First Amendment, Sullivan vs. New York Times, and subsequent decisions. I can also imagine that he explained Gawker would probably taunt her a second time because it is Gawker. Ms. Lively could easily not have cared and the lawyer was then required to send the letter. This is how it should be in terms of lawyer-client relationships.
There is also nothing that Antebellum about Ms. Lively’s fall fashion collection. Most of the clothing would not be recognizable until the 20th century. The photo spread consists of stripped shirts, leopard print skirts, shoes with impossible heels, and wide-brimmed hats. I suppose there is something vaguely Southern about wide-brimmed hats and some of the pictures do have the women dressed in what look like fancy cowgirl outfits. Nothing wrong with that but it is not exactly what someone would associate with pre-Civil War era South.
The big issue with this whole debate is that most people seem to treat history as a muddle and they seem to do things without thinking about the implications. This is not the first time that this happened this year. I’ve written about it with Urban Outfitters and their trollish Kent State sweatshirt. Spanish retailer Zara got in trouble for trying to sell a child’s outfit with blue and white stripes and a star. There was a very, very faint wording of “Sheriff” on the star but most people thought the outfit looked awfully close to a concentration camp uniform. As far as I know, Ms. Lively is the first to threaten to sue a media outlet for pointing out the historical problems with a marketing slogan for these controversies.
I can totally see that Ms. Lively and her team heard the word Antebellum and did not think of Chattel Slavery. They probably thought of luxury, slow and steamy hot days, Mint Juleps, the Kentucky Derby, and all sorts of nice things. The problem is that no one at the meetings thought to speak up about how Antebellum refers to the pre-Civil War South and a large aspect of the pre-Civil War South was how Chattel Slavery fueled the economy. There is plenty of evidence to show how Chattel Slavery might have fueled Capitalism all over 19th century America.
I am heartened to see that there are lots of people who can figure out the connection between the word Antebellum and Slavery. I just wish that some of these people ended up in marketing and were able to bring up these issues before the campaigns came out and needed to be mocked.
What do you think causes the muddle of history and thinking? What do you think causes people in marketing not to make these connections?
(1) http://gawker.com/blake-livelys-fall-fashion-inspiration-is-slaveowners-1645661587
(2) http://gawker.com/blake-livelys-fall-fashion-inspiration-is-slaveowners-1645661587/1646150135/+maxread
(3) http://www.preserve.us/blog/style/allure-of-antebellum/
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Billy Reid is a Southern fashion designed who can market the Southern nature of his clothing without bringing up the Antebellum South and various problematic things:
http://www.billyreid.com/?gclid=CLWYt-mqr8ECFQGRaQodrWQA1QReport
The hairstyling on that male model is dead solid perfect.Report
Also if he’s trying out for ‘Michael Stipe’ in the REM biopic (he’ll have to shave it for the later parts of the film).Report
I prefer to understand that some people in marketing are trolls, and occupy their time coming up with Really Bad Ideas, some of which are put forth with a straight face, and others with a rather sarcastic bent.Report
@kim
You are probably right that at some “faux-edgy” companies that would intentionally troll. But I think the are still serious flaw in your “all the world’s a troll” theory of everything.Report
Oh, hardly all the world’s a troll. But you let one manic troll take over a PR company — and suddenly it’s all laughter. Of course, sometimes laughter bites:
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/cancer/pink-drill-bits-bring-complaints-komen-tie-fracking-n223166
Remember: it takes a certain level of stupidity to actually approve trollish ideas.Report
where’s the downside here? does komen lose their stranglehold on the breast cancer fundraising industry? does the drilling company somehow lose out on whatever benefits they get from this instance of charitable partnership?
anti-fracking folk have about the same public footprint as black metal fans. they have an outsized media footprint, but little actual influence. antagonizing them is going to make not one whit of difference in donation flow for komen or revenue for baker hughes.
this isn’t like picking a fight with planned parenthood, as that ship has sailed. and most of this pickup is coming from their planned parenthood battles.Report
“Ante” means “prior”. “Bellum” means “war”. The South’s tendency to refer to “The War” as if the Civil War was the last time that shots were fired in anger is a tendency that we shouldn’t really be rewarding, here.
Maybe it’s a reference to Bush’s war. Remember how awesome stuff was before 2002? Tension with the Chinese, steel tariffs, Chandra Levy…
That makes me want to throw a striped shirt on right now!Report
This is why whenever someone says antediluvian I immediately assume that they are talking about something that happened before 1985, when the basement of my childhood home filled up with three feet of water.Report
(freakin’ creationists)Report
But I love the word antidiluvian.Report
@north
So would that be something that prevented floods?Report
Well I use it to refer to old backward cultures and things.Report
Why do you hate diluvians? They are a perfectly reasonable group of folks, maybe a little wishy-washy… but good peeps on the whole.Report
@marchmaine
They are nice enough but the water damage that they do to my apartment….Report
@saul-degraw Well sure, they party like there’s no tomorrow.Report
We should look on the bright side. Ms. Lively has just provided a way to save all the struggling humanities majors. Companies and advertisement agencies should higher history and sociology majors to work as advisors. These employees, we can call them Historical Research Analysists, could provide an advise on when a particular product or advertising campaign is a bad idea because its going to piss a lot of people off on the internet and set off a line of firely protests. Such people will allow companies to avoid controversy in the first place.Report
MFA grads everywhere will celebrate their escape from a life of drudgery writing for TV or being half employed hipsters.Report
It’s impossible to answer your questions without referring to various derogatory, and completely true, stereotypes about the intelligence of people in marketing.Report
Ryan Reynolds is famous for somehow constantly getting cast in movies despite having an acting range that starts at A and ends somewhere before B.
May not be what you meant, but Ryan Reynolds likely gets cast precisely because of those two letters: https://www.google.com/search?q=ryan+reynolds+abs&es_sm=93&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=IMY-VIGXEpO6ggS-lYHIBA&ved=0CB8QsAQ&biw=1280&bih=899
Plus, he was pretty good in Van Wilder.
More to the point of the article: you are right about Lively and you are right about people making a muddle out of history, but I’m not sure that the two link up the way that you want them to. Lots of people are educated in history and still defend the mythology of The Lost Cause.
Take Woodrow Wilson for example. He had a degree from a well-regarded liberal arts college as well as a JD from UVA and a PhD from Johns Hopkins and was the president of Princeton. And yet, he still thought it was appropriate to screen The Birth of a Nation at the White House.
And yes, that was a hundred years ago, but there are no shortage of people in the present day who want to pretend that the Civil War was really about sweet tea, parasols and chivalry.Report
I also kinda enjoyed “Paper Man” in which RR played the childhood imaginary friend of the now grown-up Jeff Daniels.
https://ordinary-times.com/jaybird/2011/04/unhappiness/Report
@j-r
Ryan Reynolds plays a type. Sometimes a little sweeter, sometimes a little more obnoxious and bro-dude but always the same type. Now Ryan Gosling, that kid can act and he is not afraid of taking a wide variety of roles including some oddballs like in Lars and the Real Girl.Report
Both Waiting and the third Blade movie are underrated. Neither are per se great, but are better than their reputations.
There’s got to be way of using some portion of the early 19th century American South culturally without inevitably invoking slavery (and without minimizing slavery) We don’t look at the Interstate system and say ‘but that’s what Hitler did’.Report
Allure of Antebellum specifically is asking for it, I think. I mean, if it had just been “Antebellum,” no one would have cared, the way they don’t care that there’s a country group called Lady Antebellum (at least mostly don’t care). But Allure? Like that period is calling to you? Yeah, asking for it. Not saying I think people should be offended, just saying that someone should have foreseen that people would be, because it was pretty damn foreseeable.Report
@chris
You are right about how Allure probably does most of the lifting.
@kolohe
I gave an example of Alabama fashion designer Billy Reid. He manages to take pride in his Southern heritage and background without going to phrases like Allure of the Antebellum.Report
consider the following hypothesis:
you are dealing with two main groups.
– the people yelling about the use of the term antebellum in the context of clothing
– the people who would blow beaucoup bucks on this stuff because they know her from somewhere and/or just like it
which one of these groups is larger, and which one is your target audience?
now, it’s not the play i would have argued for, but in pure numbers it’s nonsense to pretend that even gawker has enough audience to make this a shame play that might damage sales rather than streisand them into greater success than they might have had. it’s not like some obviously racist urban outfitters shirt or what have you. to a third party that doesn’t care much on the onset, it’s just going to be clothes and yelling about a term with zero modern significance.
related, but also consider you don’t need millions of people to know what antebellum means – they just need to following gawker on twitter, or be social media connected with someone who follows gawker on twitter, or be social media connected with someone who is social media connected with someone who follows gawker on twitter, etc.
also consider that you have a significant population that takes antebellum to mean “pro-slavery” in this context, but only really in the larger context of the writhing, lackadaisical wrath that is yelling on the internet about the moral vacuity of people you don’t know.Report
@dhex
We need the Liberal Arts to put more people in the first category than the second!
More seriously you are probably right and this is depressing. That being said I don’t know if Blake Lively has quite the following to pull off a Gwenyth Paltrow-esque lifestyle guru thing. Maybe she does. I would like to see sales data from Preserve. The site seems to be universally mocked but it is mocked by the culturally elite sources that I like.
What exactly is streissand to success? I’ve tried googling to no avail.Report
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effectReport
The ‘Streisand Effect’ is when someone with high visibility takes issue with someone of low visibility (normally through legal means), making it so that everyone now knows of the person or organization with heretofore low visibility, and moreover of the particular issue of contention, that, if not contested, would have passed without notice.Report
The Streisand Effect is when you make a big fuss over people talking about you, and their response is to to talk about you even more.
Marketers have noticed this and have learned to make it a feature rather than a bug.Report
So what’s the Streisand Effect, then?Report
I still don’t understand how “Liberal Arts” magically erases the existing remnants of white supremacy. Most of white supremacy was formally institutionalized through Liberal Arts in the first place.Report
jr,
This is like saying that Science! will fix the komen piece that I linked to.
In short, some scraps of basic knowledge will prevent people from trying to make Profit!
… are we certain Americans are not Ferengi?Report
@j-r
My hope that it causes more people to think and pause for a moment for doing something like Allure for Antebellum.Report
http://consumerist.com/2014/10/14/sears-apologizes-for-selling-swastika-rings-in-online-marketplace/
Something worth bitching about?Report
I saw this too. Yes probably. They should have checked first and checked carefully.Report
I could not disagree with this much more. The client can dictate the scope and goals of the relationship. The client does not get to dictate the means chosen, and lawyers are fully permitted to decline or withdraw from representation of a client where “the client insists upon taking action that the lawyer considers repugnant or with which the lawyer has a fundamental disagreement.”
Moreover, “a lawyer shall not use means that have no substantial purpose other than to embarrass, delay, or burden a third person.”
Now, I don’t think this letter reaches the level of unethical conduct referred to in the latter standard, but the point in referencing that is to emphasize that lawyers, and lawyers alone, are responsible for the means they use to accomplish their clients’ objectives.
I’ve seen more frivolous attempts to scare websites into surrendering their free speech rights than this – but this letter is incredibly weak sauce, and even if there’s juuuuuuuuust enough wiggle room to avoid outright frivolity here such that there was no ethical obligation to decline to do as asked, the lawyer had every right to decline to send it on the basis that it’s fundamentally wrong and repugnant (and it is).
Regardless, even if this particular lawyer was completely justified in sending this particular letter, your statement that “lawyers are controlled by their clients as they should [be]” is simply incorrect, and a lawyer who operated by that mantra would be jeopardizing his law license.Report
OK, but what exactly do you think that causal mechanism would be? Lots of people trained and versed in history still have ridiculous beliefs about the Civil War and The Lost Cause.
Also, what makes you think that the people behind this don’t have a liberal arts education. I know that you have a dislike of Marketing as a major, but there are certain nuances of marketing as a field.
Generally, there are two broad kinds of activities that fall under the rubric of marketing. There is the marketing that brand/product managers do, which is very quantitative. Brand managers tend to own the profit and loss statement of their product. The develop budgets and decide where to place the product, how much to put out, and how to promote it.
And then there is marketing that is more about branding and advertising. These are the people who come up with specific marketing campaigns and work with advertising, creative and public relations people. And this type of marketing is full of people with liberal arts degrees. I was a Philospohy and English major and my first full time job was in marketing/promotions/PR. So, the people who came up with this campaign may very well be people with English, History or Fine Arts degrees.Report
While I 100% agree that the use of Antebellum was a poor choice, let’s just play devil’s advocate for a minute here…
For Southerners it is hard sometimes because a large chunk of our history is considered offensive because of what was going on at the time. As Jaybird points out above, while antebellum is generally used to refer to the slavery period, that wasn’t the only thing that changed after the Civil War. I don’t know anything about fashion but I do know that culturally there were a lot of traditions that begin to die out that weren’t specifically tied to slavery.
What if they had used ‘Old South’ in the advertising instead? Would that have been less offensive? Is any reference to the pre-1865 South okay?Report
We should have a line of clothing based on Haymarket. They could aim the marketing at the Occupy crowd.Report
I am curious to hear examples.Report
Plantation culture in general began to disappear and that didn’t completely revolve around slavery. The way that plantations socialized with one another, the role that white women had on the plantation pre and post slavery. Religious practices. I have no facts to back this up but I would even assume that clothing styles changed as whites began to do more work themselves.Report
Mike,
white women talking like black folks, too… (it was very common to leave raising girls to a black woman, and often the girls picked up the accent along with a LOT of cultural stuff).Report
That’s a good point Kim, although I think a lot of white girls were still raised by black women in the postbellum South i.e. The Help.Report
Mike,
my problem with saying that any aspect of “plantation culture” could be glorified is… it’s basically Cavalier culture, with a strong, heavy seasoning of African Culture thrown in.
And that specifically calling out it (as opposed to “American” culture — or noble culture) is going to piss off people who are still upset about our Peculiar Institution.
About the only way you don’t piss them off, is by having your “Allure of Antebellum” line modeled by purely black women. In which case you’re either trying to be contrary, satirical or controversial. But at least you’re doing it right.Report
The Gullah culture and language might be an interesting example to sort of flip the discussion. It obviously developed during the slave era and is today a threatened traditional culture. However, I don’t think many of us would oppose the Gullah people’s ongoing efforts to preserve their cultural heritage.Report
I tend to think there’s no force on earth that will prevent shallow but good-looking people from putting their shallowness on display along with their good looks.
(Mind you, I think there are some good looking people who are smart and well-informed. I’m kind of jealous of them, but they exist.)Report
http://www.foerstel.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/62410-500×361.jpgReport
There is a band named Lady Antebellum. As far as I know, they’ve never been protested for their name. They’re from Nashville, where the word means “old-fashioned”, not “slavey”.Report
They apparently donate to Haiti.
Besides, it’s a band name. You’re lucky if the name makes any sense at all.Report
@kim
Once again The Onion got there first:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-only-7-band-names-remaining,5697/Report
Band names might not typically mean anything. but if you called a band “Slavemaster” I bet people would complain. The fact that a band name can use the word “antebellum” would indicate to me that I could start a clothing line with that word in the name.Report
Well, if Che Guevara tee-shirts have taught us anything, it’s that people who do not read a lot of history are the target market for hip clothing.Report
+1. An interesting factoid is that the iconic picture of Che was a happy accident. The photographer was doing group shots of the Cuban leadership, noticed Che’s pose and quickly took a photo.Report
This is only an issue because some people know more history than others. If nobody got the reference, it wouldn’t have caused any actual problems. Maybe we need less Liberal Arts!Report
Also, this is the kind of basic history that gets taught in primary and/or secondary school. If this were something obscure enough that you’d need the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in history to get it, it probably wouldn’t be seen as problematic.Report
I’m late to this discussion, but I think I agree with @j-r above when he says that even people well-versed in history often take positions on it, and when he suggests later on that some marketing people might very well have been trained in the liberal arts.
I think a partial answer to your question is that there are no clear-cut, easy to extract “lessons” from history. Yes, Chamberlain should’ve stood firm at Munich, but that fact doesn’t help us decide whether LBJ was right to go into Vietnam or Obama right to go after ISIS. Or if it does help us, it helps us in an oblique way that’s hard to tease out. And who knows, maybe it was a good thing Chamberlain didn’t stand firm. If he had, and if [GODWIN ALERT!] Hitler had backed down, maybe he would have bide his time until he could amass a great enough arsenal and be truly unstoppable and succeed in killing even more people.
As for the more trivial matter of marketing by using the word “antebellum,” I don’t know. It’s probably a bad idea to use it. But liberal arts education supposedly teaches you to think for yourself. Its proponents (usually) don’t purport that such an education offers an index of prohibited beliefs and/or marketing tactics. I suppose you could say at least a study of history would cause people to be aware that antebellum means something different than what these marketers apparently thought it means. But that’s the kind of history historians want their students to move beyond: learning the basic facts and memorizing lists of terms. I say this as someone who believes memorizing facts and terms is essential to a history education (you’d be surprised at how many “advanced graduate students” in US History I’ve known who haven’t even heard of Jackson’s bank war). But even I think there’s so much more to history than learning, perhaps in high school, that “antebellum means before the war, and in US History, it means before the Civil War. And many people don’t like the associations it brings about.”Report